1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an electronic document generation system generating an electronic document, and a technique related thereto.
2. Description of the Related Art
There is a technique for transmitting a scanned image generated by an image forming apparatus such as an MFP (Multi-Functional Peripheral) to an apparatus different from the image forming apparatus (for example, a cloud server) and causes the different apparatus to execute various kinds of processing based on the scanned image (for example, Optical Character Recognition processing (which will be hereinafter also referred to as OCR (Optical Character Recognition) processing)).
For example, in JP 2005-11260 A, a multi-function machine executes document scanning, and the scanned image is transmitted from the multi-function machine to a document management server. The document management server executes OCR processing on the scanned image, and transmits the scanned image and the OCR processing result (text data) to a work terminal. Then, the scanned image and the OCR processing result are displayed on the work terminal.
By the way, the scanned image made by the image forming apparatus may be transmitted to an external terminal different from the image forming apparatus, and the external terminal may generate an electronic document based on the scanned image. When an electronic document is generated by the external terminal, the external terminal may cause a cloud server to execute related processing related to generation processing of the electronic document such as OCR processing of the scanned image.
For example, when the external terminal finishes the reception of the scanned image from the image forming apparatus, the external terminal transmits (transfers) the scanned image to a cloud server to have the cloud server execute the OCR processing (related processing), and generate an electronic document (text data-attached electronic document and the like) on the basis of the scanned image and the OCR processing result executed by the cloud server. When such operation can be performed, the processing load can be distributed to multiple apparatuses.
However, in the above operation, for example, even when the scanned image includes an area in which there is no need to perform the OCR processing (not including any character), the external terminal cannot transmit the scanned image to the cloud server until the external terminal finishes the reception of all the data of the scanned image transmitted from the image forming apparatus. Therefore, when it takes a relatively long time for the external terminal to receive all of the data, there is relatively a long waiting time until the cloud server starts execution of the OCR processing, and the external terminal cannot efficiently generate the electronic document.
Such problem may occur not only when the cloud server executes related processing (OCR processing and the like) but also when the external terminal executes similar processing.